Dr. Zane F. Pollard has a penetrating article up at American Thinker on Obamacare. It’s a must-read, and a must-send to all your friends, Left and Right and in-between.
Here’s a key excerpt (but please read the whole thing; there’s much more where that came from):
I have taken care of Medicaid patients for 35 years while representing the only pediatric ophthalmology group left in Atlanta, Georgia that accepts Medicaid. For example, in the past 6 months I have cared for three young children on Medicaid who had corneal ulcers. This is a potentially blinding situation because if the cornea perforates from the infection, almost surely blindness will occur. In all three cases the antibiotic needed for the eradication of the infection was not on the approved Medicaid list.
Each time I was told to fax Medicaid for the approval forms, which I did. Within 48 hours the form came back to me which was sent in immediately via fax, and I was told that I would have my answer in 10 days. Of course by then each child would have been blind in the eye.
Each time the request came back denied. All three times I personally provided the antibiotic for each patient which was not on the Medicaid approved list. Get the point — rationing of care.
Over the past 35 years I have cared for over 1000 children born with congenital cataracts. In older children and in adults the vision is rehabilitated with an intraocular lens. In newborns we use contact lenses which are very expensive. It takes Medicaid over one year to approve a contact lens post cataract surgery. By that time a successful anatomical operation is wasted as the child will be close to blind from a lack of focusing for so long a period of time.
Again, extreme rationing. Solution: I have a foundation here in Atlanta supported 100% by private funds which supplies all of these contact lenses for my Medicaid and illegal immigrants children for free. Again, waiting for the government would be disastrous.
[NOTE: This is a reprint of a previous post. I came across it the other day and I happen to like it.]
I saw her walking ahead of me on a sidewalk in New York, and I knew immediately.
She had the long hair, slicked back into a slightly damp ponytail. The large soft bag, slung over the shoulder. The small stature and the narrow slimness. The straight spine and the long, erect neck. The impression that a plumb line had been dropped from the middle of the top of her head straight down through her torso and solar plexus, from which her body was somehow regally and calmly suspended.
And underneath it all, the feet. Larger than one might think would be the underpinnings of this otherwise diminutive person, with toes facing outwards at a sharp angle. Her feet would have made her walk seem awkward and ducklike were it not for the style and grace of the rest of her stride.
No doubt about it: she was a dancer. Ballet dancer, most likely. New York is highly populated with them. I know the contents of her large shoulder bag, too: sopping wet leotards and tights, several pairs of shoes, lambs’ wool and tape and bunion pads, a towel to wipe off the sweat, hairpins galore, and an assortment of plastic and woolen leg and body warmers to induce even more sweat and the loss of the last few ounces of fat that might still cling to that pared-down body.
Maybe a yogurt. A bottle of water. Some lettuce leaves in a small plastic container.
And an iron will, a soaring ambition, a denial of the odds, and a love of the thing itself: the sheer pleasure of forcing the body into attempting mastery of something very difficult, very beautiful, and very satisfying.
Those unruly un-American mobs of enraged independents and conservatives (and perhaps even a sprinkling of moderate Democrats) keep annoying our elected representatives with their inconvenient anger at the fact that the Obama administration and Congress seem to be intent on pulling a fast one on them by attempting to pass legislation that will change their lives for the worse in the intimate and touchy area of medical care—and to be doing so without bothering to explain to the people (or in some cases even knowing) the details of what the government is actually planning to do and why.
The resultant dismay the Left feels at this development would be almost comical if it weren’t so sad. After all, it’s the Left that’s supposed to champion “power to the people” and “speaking truth to power.”
Community organizing is the coin of the Leftist realm. But it turns out that it depends on which community is organized. If it’s downtrodden minorities, the unemployed, illegal aliens, unions, or any other group composed of and/or appealing to the natural constituency of the Left—then it’s not a mob, it’s a populist group of concerned citizens speaking their mind in classic American fashion. But if it’s anything that even remotely smacks of the Right or the middle class or even the non-union working class, it’s a bunch of pitchfork-wielding astroturfing swastika-carrying thugs.
One of the things that’s so interesting about the current development—a true populist movement that involves centrists and the Right—is the shock of the Left that such a thing is even happening. It started with the Tea Party movement, which prompted the Left (along with its handmaiden, the MSM) to immediately attempt to marginalize and invalidate that movement, by banding it as a bunch of fringe crazies. Now this strategy continues towards the even more alarming (to the Left) and more visible phenomenon of the Town Hall meeting protesters/questioners who are filled with righteous indignation that their concerns are being marginalized and condescended to.
It takes a lot to radicalize the center and the center Right. Historically, demonstrations have tended to come from the more extreme ends of either party, and ordinarily have been larger on the Left than the Right.
During the Vietnam era, we saw some of the biggest and most frequent demonstrations we’ve seen in modern times in this country, and the force of them came from the fact that although they were orchestrated, managed, and used by the far Left, many of the demonstrators came from the center Left and even the center rather than the fringes. What motivated those demonstrators—other than the pictures of carnage on the nightly news, or Walter Cronkite’s declaration of our defeat in Vietnam—was a simple fact of life: self-protection. The demonstrators were overwhelmingly young people whose lives were deeply affected by the draft, either actually or potentially.
People tend to be more driven to protest things that affect them personally rather than abstractions or faraway problems in distant lands. And it’s hard to imagine a government program that promises (or threatens) to affect people more personally than the health care reform bill, or one that has been more suspect in its claims and more murky in its lack of transparency. Therefore it should not be the least bit surprising that there’s a lot of energy in the fight against it.
What is surprising—to the Left—is that now they’re the objects rather than the perpetrators of the outrage. Their charge that opponents are astroturfers is partly a cynical ploy. But I suspect it’s also partly sincere, because they are experiencing shock and resultant denial that a populist movement has arisen against the Left itself.
After all, they wrote the book on community organizing. And now they’ve got a community organizer President—what could be better? How astounding to have the tables turned at this moment of what should be their greatest triumph.
This seems to make sense to me. It’s rational to imagine that this sort of rationing will absolutely be a part of Obamacare, either now or in the future. If it’s the hyperbole of the phrase “death panels” (as well as the fact that the hated Sarah Palin used it) that gets the goat of the Left, then let’s just call them “rationing of life-saving or life-extending care.”
I wrote of Peggy Noonan the other day that, although she’s beginning to “get” Obama and what he’s about, she’s only halfway there. Noonan still thinks he’s just receiving bad advice or making missteps, and that he’s not the master of his fate and the captain of his own policies.
I beg to differ. I think he’s revealing his true nature and ideology more and more. But I also know that:
…Noonan (and certain others) who fell for Obama hard during the campaign now find themselves suffering the pangs that disappointed lovers often feel, and a similar reluctance to face the truth that they were hoodwinked and used by a con artist.
Happens all the time…But as I said, hope dies hard. Very hard indeed.
Now comes Camille Paglia, a very different sort from Noonan but suffering from a version of the same problem. Paglia liked (and still likes) and supports Obama. But her innate honesty and common sense in some areas (not foreign policy, unfortunately) forces her into noticing just how terrible he’s been as President.
Read Paglia’s recent piece in Salon, and you’ll witness a person struggling with the clash of prior beliefs vs. present observations. If Obama is so smart, and good, and well-meaning, then why is he doing all these bad (or stupid, or destructive) things?
As so many others have done, Paglia blames Obama’s failings on bad advice. Just get rid of the bad company he keeps, and all will be well. She ignores the fact that Obama picked many of these people (not Pelosi, of course, but the non-elected ones), and that furthermore he’s been surrounded by bad company all his life.
What’s more, as he so often and repetitively reminds us, he’s the President. He sets the agenda. He can fight or criticize Pelosi or the DNC or the health care reform bill or the specifics in it if he wants to. Clearly, for the most part he does not want to, except on very rare occasions, obliquely and weakly and through third persons.
But Paglia can’t recognize that Obama is the major architect of his own policies—not yet, at least. She blames everyone else (and also seems to hold a completely bizarre perception of the cold and ruthless Axelrod as charming):
I must confess my dismay bordering on horror at the amateurism of the White House apparatus for domestic policy. When will heads start to roll? I was glad to see the White House counsel booted, as well as Michelle Obama’s chief of staff, and hope it’s a harbinger of things to come. Except for that wily fox, David Axelrod, who could charm gold threads out of moonbeams, Obama seems to be surrounded by juvenile tinhorns, bumbling mediocrities and crass bully boys.
Paglia sees the problem with the health care reform bill clearly enough, and expresses her frustration with vigor (I’m editing out the obligatory swipes at Bush and Iraq that pepper her prose):
There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama’s aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting [a] colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation…
You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you’re happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.
Paglia confesses her confusion, though, as to Obama’s motives. This is where she (like so many others) shows her reluctance to follow her own line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and to blame Obama himself fully and squarely. In an analogy I’ve used before (and will probably use again), Paglia is like a wife who’s found the lipstick on the collar and all the little love notes to another woman, and is still so in love with her husband and so desirous of saving her marriage that she’s struggling against accepting the truth that she’s been betrayed by a stinker.
But Paglia’s still thinking, at least, and asking the right questions:
I just don’t get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.
Girlfriend, let me help out and connect the dots for you. The insane rush, the failure to give the American people the details, are purposeful and not accidental. They are cheating on us, and “they” includes Obama.
They are lying, and they know it. Have you not seen this video?
Those “soothing lullaby tones” you hear are the sound of con artists trying to sweet talk us, to rush us into accepting an agenda that is quite different from the one they are pretending to offer: one that will grow government, increase their power, and end up crowding out private health insurance, rationing health care in a more draconian fashion, lining the pockets of their friends and supporters, demonizing capitalism, and socializing medicine as a step in their continuing quest to socialize this country.
What would it take to get Paglia and so many others to see this? A lot, because it involves a very basic change of perception, a loss of faith in their own previous judgment about Obama and the Democrats as a whole. Apparently not even the following is enough to cause Paglia to feel buyer’s remorse about her vote:
The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration’s outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable “casual conversations” to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.
If that’s not enough to constitute a smoking gun for Paglia, what would be?
The title of this op-ed by LA Times columnist Dan Neil caught my eye: “It’s Time to Fight Dirty.”
The piece is an admonition to the Left to take the gloves off (and here I thought it already had!) and win what Neil defines as the “war on words” on health care. Neil is angry and frustrated that:
…liberal progressives cannot seem to get on top of any public policy debate, cannot seem to win any war of words — which is just weird because you have to assume there are many more English majors among liberals.
While opinions on health-care reform break sharply along partisan lines, with most Democrats in favor and most Republicans opposed, independent voters strongly oppose the health-care reform measures pending in Congress by a whopping 70 percent to 27 percent, according to a recent Pew Research poll. How could the left possibly be losing the debate on health-care reform when its opponent is the roundly loathed health insurance industry — an ongoing criminal syndicate, in my view, that demands protection money from sick people?
Earth to Neil: maybe it’s phrases like that one at the end of your quote, comparing the health insurance industry to a criminal syndicate without even attempting to back up such an assertion. Maybe it’s that the health insurance industry isn’t quite so “roundly loathed” as you assume (if you could get out of your liberal echo chamber and pay attention to what the public actually believes rather than what you think it should believe), as polls indicate.
And maybe, just maybe, the whole thing isn’t just about spin or winning a war on words. Maybe facts are important, as well. I know that may be a novel thought, but maybe most Americans are angry at the actual provisions of the health care reform bill and upset about the ways in which it will impact their lives, as well as the obfuscation of the current Congress and adminstration about what those facts might even be, and their generalizations and condescending rhetoric (“just trust us and all will be well”) on the subject.
Maybe the poor track record of the stimulus bill also has a bit to do with the distrust of many Independents and other middle-of-the-roaders, who are not astroturfers after all.
In other words, maybe you need to think less about rhetoric and more about substance.
But the most interesting part of Neil’s piece by far was its ending, which doesn’t try to hide Neil’s conviction that anything is justified in this all-important rhetorical fight. If it’s all about demagoguery, the trick is to be a more effective and more ruthless demagogue than the other guy [emphasis mine]:
There’s some hope on the horizon, though, in the ad from Americans United for Change…The ad, titled GOP Rx, debuted last week. To a kicky bass riff and the occasional cash register ring, the female narrator asks, “Why do the insurance companies and the Republicans want to kill President Obama’s health-insurance reform?”
Note the yoking of insurance companies to Republicans. Note also that it’s Obama’s health insurance reform. Evil insurance.
The ad then lights into Cigna Corp. CEO Ed Hanway, who is retiring with a $73 million golden parachute. The GOP’s prescription for the health-care crisis? “Be as rich as Ed and you’ll be happy, too.”
Of course it’s disingenuous. Executive compensation at insurance companies is at best peripheral to escalating health-care costs. For all we know, Mr. Hanway may be one of the good guys.
The important thing is that the ad hominem ad is pointed, shrewd and manipulative. And yes, it’s class warfare. But then again, this is war.
A while back, in a post on the subject of turns in dance, I wrote:
Certain people are…that rare phenomenon known as “natural turners.” Some strange trick of brain and inner ear, some unusual sense of centered balance, allows them to turn easily almost from the moment the step is first introduced to them.
The following is an example of what I was talking about. It’s almost unbelievable how straight a plumb line this dancer’s body makes, how impervious to skew she is, how almost inhumanly rock-steady as she balances on the tiniest of pivots. She even changes her “spot” in the middle of the whole thing, making a complete revolution with that as well (a “spot” is the place a dancer focuses the eyes and head in order to keep from getting too dizzy):
The turn this dancer is demonstrating is known as the fouette—a word that means “whip.” I think you can see why it’s been applied to that particular movement. The trajectory of the leg as it quickly unfolds leads the body into the turn with a whipping force that isn’t easy to control, to say the least.
But you know what? I don’t care much for any of it. And this isn’t only because I was never all that good at fouettes, especially when on pointe.
Like most steps in ballet, the technique required of dancers performing the fouette has become more extreme. It used to be enough just to do them; the step itself elicited oohs and ahs. Now, multiple turns embedded within the fouettes (as you see in this video at the beginning and end) have become required in order to satisfy the jaded palates of the dance consumers, used to gymnastics rather than finesse, athleticism rather than art, tricks rather than sublimity.
I have searched You Tube for an example of fouettes that would partake of artistry. I couldn’t find any, even in older clips featuring dancers I admire greatly. It seems it doesn’t matter who does them, or how well or how poorly; they’re a trick that doesn’t interest me at all, although I admire the strength and balance required because I know how exceptionally difficult it is.
I know I keep harping on Obama’s reaction to Zelaya and Honduras, even though for most people it’s small potatoes compared to some of the other issues facing us, such as health care “reform.”
But Honduras matters deeply to me—perhaps because liberty matters deeply to me. And I found that it was a turning point for me with Obama.
Why? I think commenter “Synova” has expressed the reason why at least as well as I could, and perhaps better (except that I would change the word “frightened” in the first sentence to “angered”):
More than anything else that Obama has done, his support for Zelaya frightened me.
It indicated that Obama had no concept of the basis of freedom and no understanding that what makes us great is that *he* can be elected and become the President without bloodshed.
It demonstrated ignorance of the supremacy of the Constitution (rule of law) over Democracy and why that even matters to both Peace and Freedom. It proved that he has no personal concept of the reality of the tyranny of the majority.
Who is Zelaya? For that matter, who is Chavez?
Who are these men that their countries can not function without them? Are there no competent people in Zelaya’s party to step in, interchangable, into the top slot while Zelaya makes himself useful in service in other ways?
That Obama seemed only to see Zelaya’s planned election and circumvention of the Honduran constitution as a matter of majority democratic rule showed him to be shockingly unaware that such a thing as the need for checks and balances even exists.
What does that say about how he views HIS service?
Good news is always welcome, and it’s very good news indeed that Obama seems to have backed off at least somewhat on his support of would-be-dictator Zelaya.
The reason is unclear. Perhaps he saw how revelatory his previous position was about his own possible agenda. Perhaps he got too much flak even from his supporters, who were having trouble defending his indefensible policy. Perhaps the eloquence of the other side got to him—for example, when Micheletti’s excellent op-ed defending the actions of the anti-Zelaya forces in Honduras was published in the WSJ, and even the usual Obama-friendly LA Times allowed Miguel Estrada to have a definitive say on the matter, eviscerating whatever was left of Obama’s lame legal “argument.”
Whatever, right?:
As it turns out, the U.S. Senate can’t find any legal reason why the Honduran Supreme Court’s refusal to let Zelaya stay in office beyond the time allowed by Honduran law constitutes a “military coup.”
This marks a shift. The U.S. at first supported Zelaya, a man who had been elected democratically but didn’t govern that way. Now they’re reaching out to average Hondurans, the real democrats.
Sure, the U.S. continues to condemn Zelaya’s ouster and still seeks mediation of the dispute through Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. But no U.S. sanctions means Hondurans have won.
Let’s hope so, despite the best efforts of President Obama to thwart them. And don’t sit on a hot stove till the MSM reports this properly. Wouldn’t do to let Obama look so wrong, and so stupid.
But things are looking up for the brave people of Honduras, and perhaps even other Latin American nations as well:
This isn’t to say U.S. policymakers are happy or that the dispute is over. Honduras is still suspended from the Organization of American States, its trade has been disrupted, Venezuela’s oil is still cut off, and its officials still can’t get U.S. visas. But the worst is over. Whatever changes that come will be by Honduran consent alone…This, by the way, also opens the door to a return of democracy in troubled nations like Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Cuba and Venezuela. People in those nations can take courage from Honduras.
People in those nations? How about people here, as well? After all, it may be that we’re fighting against a similar menace. Who would have thought that Honduras would be an inspiring beacon of defiance against a US administration intent on stifling liberty?
[ADDENDUM: Commenter “MrsWhatsit” points out that Obama may be pulling a double Emily Litella. Never mind the never mind?
Here’s the relevant quote, from today’s NY Times:
“Let me be very clear in our belief that President Zelaya was removed from office illegally, that it was a coup and that he should return,” Mr. Obama said. He dismissed as “hypocrisy” the criticism from some in Latin America who say the United States has done too little to pressure Honduras’s de facto government to return Mr. Zelaya to power ”” among them Mr. Zelaya himself.
“The critics who say that the United States has not intervened enough in Honduras,” he said, “are the same people who say that we’re always intervening, and that the Yankees need to get out of Latin America.”
They are? I suppose a few of them are the same people, but most of them are not. That’s been a cry of the Left for many years, not the Right—although of course some on the Right, especially its more isolationist wing, echo it. But it’s neither the Left, nor the isolationist wing of the Right, who are Obama’s main critics for his support of Zelaya.
Not to mention the fact that there is still absolutely no legal support for Obama’s assertion that Zelaya was removed illegally, or that it was done through a coup (plus, Obama’s critics are not even asking him to intervene in support of Zelaya’s opponents—just that he be neutral, stay out of it, and let the Hondurans handle it). Au contraire; the law is squarely behind Zelaya’s removal. But we can’t very well expect Obama to understand anything about law, especially of the constitutional variety, can we?]
Okay, maybe it’s not a new low for Pelosi; there’ve been so many.
But this is pretty far down on the list [emphasis mine]:
Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American. Drowning out the facts is how we failed at [health care reform] for decades.
Health care is complex. It touches every American life. It drives our economy. People must be allowed to learn the facts.
Isn’t projection wonderful?
I’d counsel Pelosi and Hoyer to practice what they preach—but I know my advice would fall on deaf ears. In their opinion, populist dissent is just fine—as long as it emanates from the Left.
